


The Asset Archives

by 401



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Conditioning, Fighting, Hydra, M/M, Medical Procedures, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, Steve Rogers Feels, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-17 06:05:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4655445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/401/pseuds/401
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Don’t let Cap watch those tapes, Wilson,” Natasha whispered soberly, “He doesn’t need to see that.”</p><p>Going through old evidence of Bucky's time with Hydra reveals the full extent of what he has been through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Asset Archives

The desks and couches of the Washington SHEILD Headquarters were covered in a thick spread of papers, photographs and yellow wallet files, some littered haphazardly and some piled up with military organization, depending on who was working through them. Natasha’s pile was beautiful, square edges and alphabetisation. Banner’s was a train wreck. ‘Intelligent chaos’, he called it.

The Winter Soldier case, jovially nicknamed ‘Operation Icicle’ by Tony, had mostly been put to rest. Bucky was in rehabilitation with SHEILD and the emotional and physical scars he was left with were on their way to resolve. He was comfortable to do things without order, and would no longer flip his lid if he was touched without warning. He was less violent and would speak, if only when spoken to, but it was progress all the same.

He remembered Steve almost fully now, liked Natasha, and laughed at Sam’s jokes. He would listen to Dr Banner go on about the scientific jargon that the others usually ignored for hours in rapture and was terrified of Tony’s laugh.

All of these little details and traits, improvements and changes made it easy for Steve to put the ordeal he had gone through out of his head.

Until they found those tapes.

The dust had settled and the inevitable paperwork was rising from the ashes of the action. It was mainly things from the Hydra bunker they had stormed (the one Bucky had been held in). There were plans for future experiments, blueprints for machines and older prototypes of Bucky’s arm. And there was a small box of DVD’s labelled ‘The Asset Archive’.

Natasha had watched them first, alone.

 

“You good, Nat?” Sam asked as the redhead walked back into the file-covered lounge, clutching the box of disks with tight knuckles, like it was a bomb.

She looked shaken, distracted and slightly paler than when she had left. She put the box on the table with a thud and sighed.

“Yeah,” She said flatly, “Yeah, I’m just fine.”

Steve looked up from the paper he was nursing from his place on the couch, lying on his back with this feet up on the armrest. Sam frowned at Nat suspiciously.

“You’re sure about that, Natasha?” He pressed, sensing the unease in her stance.

She nodded, over-enthusiastically.

“Yeah…just gonna take a break,” She cleared her throat and pulled Sam out of Steve’s earshot.

“Don’t let Cap watch those tapes, Wilson,” She whispered soberly, “He doesn’t need to see that.”

Steve breathed a little laugh of confusion to himself.

For an assassin, Natasha never had been very good at whispering.

#

 

This was probably illegal. Did this count as stealing evidence? The case was not closed so Steve guessed that what he was doing was probably illegal, but as he secured ‘The Asset Archive’ box to the back of his motorcycle with bungee cord and blitzed through the darkened streets of Washington DC, the shits he gave towards the matter decreased considerably. He had been in the dark about Bucky for long enough that he felt he deserved this little piece of knowledge.

He dismounted the bike and took the box into his apartment, knocking four times on the wall to announce himself to Bucky who was presumably in bed by this time. It was one of the weeks he got to spend at home with Steve. He was at SHIELD every other week, but Bruce Banner had been so happy with his progress that he had allowed him these weeks of freedom on the condition that Steve took him into SHIELD in the event of an ‘incident’. They had only had two so far, one caused by the noise of a dropped frying pan and one by a flashback. Both had resulted in Steve getting a steaming black eye and a lecture in caution from Fury. Steve could not hold back the urge to comfort Bucky when he was in a state, despite his instruction to stand back and let him ride it out. He had stood back enough.

Steve stuck his head around the bedroom door and sure enough Bucky was out cold, sprawled out on his front with a mess of dark hair obscuring his face. The steady rise of his back told that he wouldn’t be up for a fair while. The covers were only halfway up his body so Steve tiptoed in, pulled them up the whole way and pressed a kiss against the back of Bucky’s head.

Leaving, Steve sat down on the couch and wasted no time in putting the first disk into the drive of his laptop.

It flicked into action. It was Bucky and another man, dressed in black with a shaved head and a tight mouth. The man’s lack of hair made the rhythmic, pulsing of tension in his jaw obvious under the taut, sweaty skin. There was anxiety of his face, no matter how firm he was keeping it. Bucky had a red cloth tied around his eyes, blinding him completely. His hair was slightly shorter too, hanging about his cheeks rather than his chin. They were fighting, sparring in the gym at the bottom of the bunker; Steve recognised it. Bucky was faster than the man, much faster and Steve cursed the little rise of sympathy for the trained martial artist getting his ass kicked by a tired looking amputee with a blindfold on. It couldn’t have been the man’s finest moment.

It was a good five minutes, a long time by combat standards, before Bucky missed a punch, the trainer connecting with Bucky’s chin sharply. Steve could see the fatigue in Bucky’s movements, and by the amount of sweat soaking through the grey tank top that he was wearing, Steve guessed they’d been at this for hours. The fight stopped and two men in lab coats marched forwards from the shadows of the concrete training square. Steve winced and his chest bristled with a wave of rage as one man pushed Bucky to his knees and the other pressed an electrical anode to his chest. It sent a current through Bucky that took him to the floor in seconds. Screaming filled Steve’s headphones before he paused the video.

This was the conditioning Natasha had told him about. Bucky had missed a move, so he was being punished. Enough of that and he would not forget as many moves in fear of punishment. It was a sick philosophy.

Steve took a breath and switched to the next video.

The screen was blank at first, just muffled audio of a man with a thick German accent reading out dates and codes.

When the screen came on it was Bucky again, this time on the procedure chair that Steve also recognised from the raid of the bunker. Steve bit his lip and focused.

Bucky looked out of it, his head lulling from side to side in panic that was stifled and held back by drowsiness and disorientation.

“Hold him still,” The man behind the camera ordered.

An orderly shoved Bucky’s head against the chair, making the soldier whimper in a way that made Steve’s stomach drop a foot.

“Please, please don’t do it again,” Bucky’s voice was breathless and quiet, “I won’t fail again, please.”

There was desperation and hopelessness on his face. His lips were shaking like he was just about holding it together. _‘I ain’t ever gonna’ let em see me bawl, Stevie.’_

It was a stubbornness in Bucky that 70 years in and out of cryofreeze was not going to extinguish.  


Bucky gave up and started to sob, almost silent shaking in his chest. Steve brushed away the tears blurring his vision. He felt an odd and kind of masochistic need to know what had happened to Bucky. He felt as if it was fair. If he was going to be the one to tell Bucky to cheer up when he was depressed or calm down when he was angry, he wanted to know what he was up against.

“This is not a punishment, Sergeant Barnes,” a tall man in a lab coat chuckled, pushing a rubber gag into Bucky’s mouth roughly before securing his leg in a vice.

“We want to test your healing, your regeneration quotient.”

There was a pause in the action whilst the lab-coated man fiddled with the vice around Bucky’s shin. He pulled down the lever.

The crunch that followed made cold run down Steve’s spine and the scream of agony from Bucky made his eyes water.

Steve slammed the laptop shut, sighing as he heard the screen crunch and the hinges pop. He slumped forward, leaning his elbows on his knees letting out a shaky breath before his own tears started to drop onto the carpet between his feet. He rubbed them away with trembling hand, the pressure on his eyelids revealing a hazy orange and red duplicate of the video footage, like it was branded into his brain.

He stood up, composing himself. It was something he was getting very good at.

He walked back into the quiet bedroom, kicking the box of tapes under the coffee table before crawling into bed behind Bucky.

The sleeping soldier shifted in his sleep, exhaling noisily into a stretch before relaxing. Steve wrapped his arms around Bucky’s middle, kissing the tape of his neck and closing his eyes against the overwhelming body-heat, and vowed that he would never let this man be hurt again.

The Asset Archives were closed.


End file.
